Today's solutions for contact management include contact lists in Personal Information Management (PIM) software, buddy lists, connections, contacts, friends, circles, aspects and other individual and group contact concepts present on desktops, mobile devices, as well as general purpose and professional networks. These solutions emphasize the existence and sometimes the category of connections between participants (such as former colleagues, doing business together, referred by third person, etc.) but often offer little tools and information helping understand the dynamics and history of relations between contacts in conjunction with their meetings and mutual experiences. An increasing number of people who are meeting each other for the first time in a social environment lack easy-to-use, secure, compelling and socially acceptable tools for exchanging personal information between their mobile devices and capturing personal context and dynamics within contact management applications. It should also be noted that members of social networks who are meeting each other in-person rarely need exchanging extensive amounts of personal contact information between them: once a key piece of such information, such as an email address, is known, the rest can often be extracted from social networks.
Mobile devices with cameras, loaded with software like Evernote Hello, are putting real-life and virtual meetings (“encounters”) at the center of memorizing and retrieving contact profiles. Chronologically ordered photos of people met by an individual, such as “people mosaic” in the Evernote Hello or “photo wall” in the ContactFlow contact management software emphasize contact photos as one of the most efficient ways to memorize people. The role of personal photos in contact management is constantly increasing; applications are starting to use multiple contact photos to enhance communications experience in the personal and business space. Methods have been proposed for optimal capturing contact photos by participants of an encounter; thus, the Evernote Hello software includes an instructional UI working with device sensors to optimize a view angle for best capturing of facial photos. Still, multiple contact photos are in many cases non-representative; when such images are collected from social networking sites or are based on sporadic personal photos taken at different times and under different conditions, they may have significant variations in size, image quality and lack consistency, expressiveness and thoroughness.
Accordingly, it is desirable to develop cohesive methods and processes for capturing multiple facial photos with different view angles and personal expressions for use with contact management software and other applications.